How Web 2.0 Revolutionized the Generation and Consumption of Information

Web 2.0 is a term coined in 1999 used to describe the network as a platform ¹, occupied by the users, which introduced the opportunity for them to become both producers and consumers of content. Its main characteristics included new technologies which harnessed the power of the open architecture of the web and facilitated the interconnectedness of users as a consequence of easy content generation and the emergence of social graphs. This, along with the aura of readily available and easily processable data which stem from the inherent nature of the internet, resulted in a huge change in the way information was consumed and created.

Looking back, one can say that Web 2.0 largely modified the way people communicated and connected. While previously content creators were few and consumers many, with the evolution in this new platform, numerous technologies enabled vast amounts of users to submit their own creations ². Blogs and social media helped shape the Web into a multi-way medium and have become the established practice for creating user generated content as well as shifting the emphasis in web cultures away from static and toward dynamic content and user engagement ³.

A great paradigm of such a trend is Wikipedia. What initially started as an experiment on human trust on anonymous media such as the Internet, evolved into a revolutionary platform of great social impact for user-generated content and collaboration. Wikipedia is a living example of Linus’ Law that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” ⁴. Other services, such as Coursera, Khan Academy etc. creatively exploit the open architecture and collective intelligence of the Internet by providing world-class education, free for anyone in the world to benefit from.

The change in the circulation and generation of data in the Internet became apparent when the interconnectedness between the users of the Web 2.0 was realized and developed upon with the growth of social media networks. With the huge increase of people using such services, the network effect described the value of a service to a user that arose from the number of people using that service. Hence, the more people using particular platforms, the better they got (Metcalfe’s Law) ⁵. This in addition to the emergent user behaviour not being predetermined led to ever evolving communities and technologies in ways that no one could predict. Another important aspect that derived from the interconnectedness of users was the study of such networks through social graphs, in which the users were symbolized as nodes. It became possible to understand the sociological implications of content creation ⁶ and examine interesting underlying patterns in the structure of the data. The liberation of huge amounts of information, which is becoming easily accessible through open APIs could prove to be an important element of the Semantic Web, (or Web 3.0) in the future.

On the other hand, the vast amount of data on the Internet often leads to an overload of information. Content consumption is becoming passive, good content is often buried under oceans of cat videos and the discovery and digestion of useful information can prove to be a challenge. Furthermore, with the exponential increase of user generated content, the issue of privacy is becoming a growing concern. The more freedom people have to spread information online, the more likely it is that people’s private secrets will be revealed in ways that can hinder their opportunities in the future ⁷. The walls of privacy are coming down on the Internet and a decision will soon have to be made on whether we will maintain the democratic nature of the internet or exploit its huge potential for control ⁸.

It seems as if the keyword during this evolution of the Web is data. Attempts of taking the platform to new directions will be largely dependant on developing new technologies and understanding the relations between each user’s data. Web 2.0 introduced new ways of generating and consuming information and paved the way for a new, social aspect in the ways it was communicated and digested. Users’ ability to personalize the Web and create a truly customized experience is still being realized and ample opportunities exist for new services and concepts to materialize and further change the way we perceive data on the information superhighway.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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